The chaotic nature of the weather/climate attractor intrinsically limits the deterministic skill of weather forecasts by promoting rapid growth of errors. In this study, such error growth is simulated by artificially perturbing the atmosphere at initial time, and its sensitivity to the chosen perturbation methodology and to the flow characteristics is investigated. The different simulations are...

Critical transitions occur in a variety of dynamical systems. Here we employ quantifiers of chaos to identify changes in the dynamical structure of complex systems preceding critical transitions. As suitable indicator variables for critical transitions, we consider changes in growth rates and directions of covariant Lyapunov vectors. Studying critical transitions in several models of fast-slow ...

The cylindrical lock-release laboratory experiments of Sutherland & Nault (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 586, 2007, pp. 109–118) showed that a radially advancing symmetric intrusive gravity current spreads not as an expanding annulus (as is the case for bottom-propagating gravity currents), but rather predominantly along azimuthally periodic radial ‘spokes’. Here, we investigate whether the spokes are a...

This paper is concerned with the connection between two classes of population variables: measures of population growth rate--the Malthusian parameter, the net reproduction rate, the gross reproduction rate, and the mean life expectancy; and measures of demographic heterogeneity--population entropy. It is shown that the entropy functions predict the response of the growth rate parameters to pert...

In this study, singular vector analysis was performed for the period from 1856 to 2003 using the latest Zebiak–Cane model version LDEO5. The singular vector, representing the optimal growth pattern of initial perturbations/errors, was obtained by perturbing the constructed tangent linear model of the Zebiak–Cane model. Variations in the singular vector and singular value, as a function of initi...